Blog posts from April 2006

I've just finished my semester at Dominican as an adjunct—the version
of LIS 753 Internet Fundamentals & Design I teach is taught over
three fun-filled and information-packed weekends—and turning the
students in the class on to online social tools and the bigger picture of what's happening online was a
highlight for me. We ended the class with group presentations, a discussion of the Newsweek cover story on the Social Web, and a look at three 2.0 job descriptions as a wrap up. Read More »

[UPDATE: The title has been corrected from the original publishing of this post.]

Booklist Online, as of the beginning of April, is ready for your library staff members' (and your patrons', if you so desire) perusal. To facilitate the browsing, the newly launched online version of Booklist is available via a free thirty-day trial. Read More »

Avatars need libraries, too, you know. An avatar—in this context—is "an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality." Last Thursday, the Alliance Library System officially announced that this summer it plans to begin offering library services to avatars who live and work in the 3D virtual space Second Life. Second Life has significantly more than 100,000 registered avatars, but at any given time a few thousand are actually online and active, so this global virtual village currently is about the size of Vegetable City, Iowa. You can set up one avatar for free, but the real folks at Second Life do ask for a credit card number or Paypal info. for verification purposes. Read More »

Can we claim that there's a difference between watching television and playing a video game? or reading a book and surfing the Web? or writing a letter and writing an e-mail? or having a conversation and participating in some form of Instant Messaging? Does the mobility of telecommunications shift our everyday lives? Are we more individualized in contemporary culture than we were when people watched television in the 1960s and `70s? Read More »

In my first article in this series, I wrassled with the biggest bear in the forest: how most online catalogs lack relevance ranking. That's one big hairy bear, but as some readers pointed out, it's a little forced to pick on relevance ranking, out of the context of all the other important features most online catalogs don't offer—or are features implemented so badly that librarians disable these features rather than further confuse the poor user, who just wants to find a book or DVD, for crying out loud. Read More »